* These wonderful passages on Beethoven almost make one wish Dick had been a music critic, and if one senses more authority on behalf of classical than pop, well, who needed another rock writer in 1979? Why not someone to make a case for the modern relevance of Beethoven, Bach, Mahler, and Schubert? Among other music he mentions in the Exegesis we find Eno (Discreet Music), the Beatles (“Strawberry Fields Forever,” through which God speaks to him), David Bowie (more the cinematic Bowie than the musical one), Neil Young (though he doesn’t know it’s Young, referring to a cover version by a band called Prelude), and Paul McCartney, on whose first solo album he blames a “psychotic journey,” surely the only time McCartney has been credited with such a thing.—SE
* Nineteenth-century writer Thomas Carlyle, writing of his own Valis-like experience in his semi-autobiographical Sartor Resartus, asks, “How paint to the sensual eye . . . what passes in the Holy-of-Holies of Man’s Soul; in what words, known to these profane times, speak even afar-off of the unspeakable?” Exhausting the quest to describe the extraordinary unity of what is, we can focus our awareness on ordinary reality and explore not only the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” but the unmistakable actuality of the unity of our subjective experience. In focusing on the unity of self, we glimpse the unity of reality. For Dick, this discovery is the occasion for the world flipping inside out, “reverting.” His Palm Tree Garden is akin to the Kingdom of Heaven in the Gospel of Luke—a way of training the mind to perceive both the eternal and the particular aspects of experience, both external reality and internal subjection. Search for this inner kingdom continuously, and we no longer see simply “through a glass darkly,” but instead perceive the immanent and eternal order of the cosmos as the unity of within and without. This possibility shifts the burden of Dick’s inquiry—and it shifts often, as if dancing—to an inquiry, not into the nature of Valis and the “essence” of all things, but into the realm of this space and time.—RD
* This dream spawned the fractured fairy tale The Divine Invasion (1981), a broken novel leaking visionary gems. One of these is the “holoscope,” a layered, three-dimensional holographic Bible, pulsing with red and gold, that can reveal fresh messages depending on the reader’s interactive angle of view. In some ways a model for the Exegesis itself, the holoscope is also drawn from the Exegesis, or at least from the hypnagogic vision Dick records a few pages after this apocalyptic dream, on [48:839]: a luminous red-and-gold tetragrammaton (YHWH), resembling the plasmate, that pulses along to the repeated phrase “And he is alive.” Less groovy is this second coming dream, which drips with the satanic panic and homophobia popular among the more rabid of America’s fringe Christians. Dick sometimes shared in this deeply unfortunate strain of the Christian imagination: a tendency to demonize made possible in part by the concept of a conspiratorial Satan. Elsewhere in these late folders, Dick pines for the return of the “rightful king” who will be recognized only by the “elect”; in March 1981, he records a dream in which “God (Valis)” is finally in total control and “the separation of the sheep from the goats has begun.”—ED
* The work of Martin Heidegger becomes progressively more important to Dick as the Exegesis unfolds. Dick has a sense of Heidegger’s question of Being and its link to the question of time through Dasein, which is Heidegger’s term of art for the human being and the key concern of Being and Time (1927). Dick shows an understanding of some of the key concepts in Being and Time, especially thrown-ness (Geworfenheit), anxiety (Angst), and uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit). Dick also references the concept of authenticity, the condition for which is Heidegger’s notion of being-toward-death, a crucial element as well in the existential psychology that influenced Dick. Dick shows some sense of what is at stake for Heidegger in the recovery of Parmenides’ fragment “It is the same thing to think and to be,” with its suggestion of the sameness or unity of noein and einai, thinking and being. Yet, Dick’s reading of Heidegger is singular, to say the least. Here Dick wants to identify Heidegger’s concern with Being with God in the form of the Hebraic YHWH, which is something that would have alarmed Heidegger, as he was prone to a certain deafness regarding the Judaic God. Elsewhere, Dick identifies Sein with the universe and states that in creating the universe the godhead was forced into sin. Through his reading of Hans Jonas’s The Gnostic Religion, Dick also persistently connects Heidegger’s thinking to the radical stances of early Christianity and Gnosticism.—SC
* Dick refers to Luther specifically here, but he’s speaking more broadly of a number of Christological theories that propose that Christ’s crucifixion constituted the punishment deserved for all of the sins of the world. In Dick’s formulation, it is not a question of Christ suffering a necessary penalty, but rather of his disrupting the very machinery by which the punishment of sin operates. Christ tricks the system, not by substituting himself in the place of the individual sinner, but by convincing the system that no wrongdoing has occurred that merits punishment. It is a substitution, not of one being in place of another, but of misinformation in place of accurate data. The reason for the substitution is mercy: Christ’s realization that the justice meted out by the system is not just.—GM
* Dick’s opposition to the concept of determinism is here carried to its most extreme: opposition to the very idea of natural law. Dick places the moral value of the individual (the means) above the selfish genes that drive the organism to reproduce (the end): the being itself is greater than its programmed purpose. Dick refuses to accept a mechanistic or deterministic explanation of life; to do so in his view is to ignore the actual experience of living. If a mechanistic principle underlies human life, he suggests, then it is a fetter to be burst.—GM
* This passage displays an odd eerie resemblance to Plato’s description in the Phaedrus (at 247c) of how the immortals travel up and outside in order to stand on the backside of the heavens, which is imagined as a revolving sphere from which they can contemplate what lies beyond, that is, what exists outside the sphere. Here, perhaps, we find Dick walking on the balloon of the cosmos. Dick, of course, saw all sorts of profound connections and similarities between his own experience of Valis and ancient writers like Plato and Plotinus. Here is another.—JJK